I am just taking a class on anthropology and i learned a lot about excavations and surveys. I read that historians, anthropologists, archaeologist etc want to exploit as much as they can from a site to study and while being non destructive. Say survey before excavating or excavating layers by layer to have a timeline and recording everything.
It then came to my mind if they ever stop and say "we could get more info out of it if we had better tools" and stop. Say an ancient sealed tomb. Once you open it, its exposed. So maybe x-rays or ultrasounds tech would help and they leave it sealed until then. Or do researchers always go for it and try to get as much as they can from what they have.
I mean, there's only so much we can wait and hope on tech but also theres only so much on artifacts on a site that once excavated is tampered with.
I am fairly knew to this field. Sorry if its dump and/or not allowed here. Thanks!
Pompeii is an example of this. About a third of the city has not been excavated and has largely been left for future archaeologists and technologies.
What has been excavated is under constant preservation, with various success. In 2010 the city’s gladiator school collapsed due to heavy rains. The EU funded a project to restore and preserve much of the exposed city. It started in 2012, and just wrapped up in December 2019.
You can read more about recent finds in the exposed part of the city in an article in National Geographic from July, 2020 here.
One example of this that I'm aware of would be the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang (the emperor for whom the Terracotta Warriors in were created). The Chinese government has decided to wait before excavating the tomb because the risk of damage/deterioration is too great. When I visited the Warriors in 2015, I was told that the government had also decided to keep some of them unexcavated, in part because exposure to the air destroys the warriors' paint.